The rise of the internet and the development of publication tools has made it very convenient for publishers to set up websites and provide content to the public in a quick and cost-effective manner. However, most websites are only economically successful if they manage to attract a significant number of readers (“website traffic”), as this determines the value of the website which can be monetized in various ways, e.g. by placing advertising on the website. Website traffic is the result of both new visitors coming to the website, as well as returning readers. As an important tool to build up the number of returning readers publishers choose to offer visitors to subscribe to their website so that subscribers receive alerts when new content has been published, so that those subscribers come back to the website and increase the website traffic accordingly. For example, many publishers offer email-newsletters or social media (Facebook, Twitter etc.) subscription options or infoservices which allow subscribers to get updates once new content has been published.
Another technology to provide a subscription option or infoservice for a website's content are web feeds. Web feeds are separate web pages which mirror a part or the full website's content in a structured format. This structured format allows other software programs to read and further process this information. For example, subscribers can download and use “feed reader software” which screens the content of the selected web feeds and delivers new content to subscribers if such content has been published. Most new websites already have such web feeds included when they are set up, for example a website with the domain www.samplesite.com may have already a web feed at the location www.samplesite.com/feed. Two common forms of web feeds are RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) feeds and Atom feeds.
Despite the advantages, web feed technology has not reached widespread adoption by the internet community. The main reason for this is that web feeds are perceived as very technical and complicated for the average internet user. For example, if a web feed page is opened in a browser, it displays a page of codes which provides no further information how to use it.
As a result of the above, services have been developed which redirect the user, if opened the url of a web feed page, to a more user-friendly webpage which includes an instruction how to subscribe to it. However, replacing the web feed with such an infoservice requires a number of steps for the publishers, such as registering at a third-party-service which provides this feature, which many publishers find too cumbersome to do. Also, many publishers are not aware of those services. Therefore many publishers do not use those services and subscribers face the challenges as mentioned above. Also, the subscription pages where subscribers subscribe to the infoservices typically only have a very limited functionality for subscribers to tailor the messages they are going to receive in the future to their needs, e.g. with respect to message content (no filtering features) as well as with respect to output channels, i.e. subscribers cannot choose how messages will be delivered to them.
Therefore, there is a need for a technology that enables publishers to quickly and easily offer an infoservice to their visitors based on their web feed(s) which provides an easy-to-use interface for subscribers, as well as various features for subscribers to subscribe according to their needs. The present invention solves this and other problems in a unique and novel manner.